Besides having significantly enhanced throughput, fourth generation (4G) cellular wireless access systems are expected to be cost efficient and to provide sufficient performance even at the cell edge. Using the so-called radial space-division multiple access (RDMA), the system's spectral efficiency can be significantly improved, and fairness among users without increasing the number of antennas and without requiring fast backbone communication and synchronization between base stations can be provided. The basic idea is to increase the capacity of the multi-user channel under fairness constraints by exploiting not only the angular dimension of space, as in space-division multiple access (SDMA), but also the radial dimension by using simultaneous transmission of multiple signals over the same radio resource and joint detection in the receiver. Significant throughput gains are achieved with low complexity methods requiring only long term channel statistics and no instantaneous channel state information at the transmitter. These throughput gains can be achieved without requiring more advanced analogue hardware or increasing bandwidth or transmit power.